Off the record: the decay of old-world journalism

Defending legacy news organizations by pointing out the shortcomings of new media outlets is like an an old farmer trying to justify his failing crops by comparing his harvest to the first plant of the young city folk who moved in down the road: the old farmer has had longer to try to get it right.

Legacies such as the New York Times and Washington Post should know better by now, and yet, they—like journalists from lesser-famed news sources and just as bloggers (both pajama-wearing and office-attired)—don’t seem to have a compass of journalism principles to guide them.

Perhaps this is the Decline and Fall of 20th-Century Journalism, and we’ve just been experiencing media decadence, which will hasten the end of old-world journalism and usher in the dawn of a new era of information sharing.

Look no further than the past week to see the evidence of old-journalism decay:

• There was, of course, Charlotte Allen’s editorial in the Washington Post on her distaste for certain women—as horrifying as it was error-riddled.
• Little defense has been offered against the accusation that American journalists tend to protect rather than expose the secrets of powerful people, a sharp contrast to The Scotsman printing the “monster” remark by Obama’s aide, even though she tried to strike it from the record after saying it. MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson magnified the apparent US media weakness when he had The Scotsman reporter on his show.
• Buy-out bids at the New York Times were due last week, but if those staff members who opted were too few to fill up the 100 newsroom cuts announced in late February, then the paper will have to resort to lay-offs. As one long-running writer at the Times put it, “People here are used to the idea that that doesn’t happen here.”
• Add to all of that the dubious media coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential nomination race, the frequent short-comings of the American press in international news, and not to mention the incessant celebrity gossip.

As the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland put it in his worthy piece, Long Winter for the Media,

Access to the Internet gives the generations living today the choice to be the best-informed, or the worst-informed, human beings in history — but we will never be able to claim that we were the least-informed. Celebrity, slime and crude polemics pour from the electronic faucets as easily as high-minded exegeses.

Where are the leaders of the information and media revolution to guide the straying generations living today to ethical, interesting and correct information?

Survey says: more people get their news online, especially journalists

  If almost all journalists go online daily to find news and nearly half of the rest of us do the same, then media professionals should again find themselves with news expertise to offer readers.

• Many sources such as news wires and press releases, which were once exclusively available to journalists, are now open directly to citizens. However, while journalists collect and process this information for a living, other professionals don’t have all day to wade through everything.  
• Here may be where the ideas of link journalism and networked link journalism would come into play. As they do their research and investigating, reporters could then compile their reference and source links for readers who would otherwise spend hours clicking around on search engines to find the complete story.
• With such disclosure, journalists could regain the trust of their “audience”, not only letting the sources speak for themselves, but being helpful at the same time.
• The recent We Media/Zogby Interactive survey reminded the newspaper industry that it is not only facing a crisis in declining circulation and advertisement revenue, but also in declining credibility and quality.
• Now that readers can check the facts for themselves by following links in the news they read on the Internet, it is no wonder the poll found that online news has a greater share of the people’s trust, as stated in the 27 February 2008 press release on the Zogby Web site:

The survey finds the Internet not only outweighs television, radio, and newspapers as the most frequently used and important source for news and information, but Web sites were also cited as more trustworthy than more traditional media sources – nearly a third (32%) said Internet sites are their most trusted source for news and information, followed by newspapers (22%), television (21%) and radio (15%).

  Another important reminder that the survey gives the media is that traditional journalism has lost touch with its local reader.

  As more people gain access to international and national news on the Internet, they rely less on their local newspaper or TV station to learn what’s going on “out there”. The study affirms that citizens feel they’re lacking community news about what’s going on “right here.”

  No longer does every paper in the U.S. need a Washington bureau and a Middle East correspondent. Local papers can now redouble their focus and resources on local news and give the people what they really want. Of course, they will want to provide this news on their Web sites.

Other findings from the survey include:

• Although the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism (64%), overall satisfaction with journalism has increased to 35% in this survey from 27% who said the same in 2007.
• Both traditional and new media are viewed as important for the future of journalism – 87% believe professional journalism has a vital role to play in journalism’s future, although citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) are also seen as significant by most Americans.
• Very few Americans (1%) consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news (1%).
• Three in four (75%) believe the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.
• 69% believe media companies are becoming too large and powerful to allow for competition, while 17% believe they are the right size to adequately compete.

Paradigm shift in the gatekeeper debate

For a community in which the invention of coloring technology is as critical as the printing press, the media—new and old— are strangely viewing the gatekeeper debate in black and white.

Here’s the gray, and fuchsia, and Technicolor film:

Professional and participatory media can thrive together; imagine, mainstream and grassroots, harmonizing. Actually, they must if the art of news is to realize its highest form: accessible, timely, relevant information that adheres to the journalistic standards of balance, truth and integrity.

We’ll get there, eventually, although it could possibly be much sooner if blogger and newspaper advocates would spend less energy trying to block one another’s entrance into press conferences.

One constructive debate to launch would be Daniel Conover’s thoughts on the conundrum of 21st Century journalism. He humbly offers up for discussion possible solutions to the obstacles faced in building bridges across the print v. on-line rift. He addresses the heart of the matter with about 25 points, such as open sources, intelligence briefing models, curating information, accepting profit margin declines, and more. Brilliant.

Washington Post staff writer, Jose Antonio Vargas, in his November 2007 story Storming the News Gatekeepers, illustrates beautifully the distraction caused by the resistance on all fronts.

Why couldn’t the flood gates be flung wide open for anyone to plunge into the collective knowledge of the human race? How would that make the professional journalist’s job obsolete? If anything, it would enrich the quality, purpose and importance of her craft. She would then siphon the information into niche tributaries, much as she always has, but with improved resources.

Michael Karlberg writes about this adversarial culture of contest in his book How Everyone Can Win. The future, Karlberg predicts, is moving towards cooperation. Vargas highlighted a glimmer of this bright future in his story:

“High school and college students are writing for Scoop08, where relatively experienced student journalists are guiding inexperienced student CJs (citizen journalists). “This is the future of journalism, I think: journalists working with citizen journalists,” says Scoop’s co-founder, 18-year-old Alexander Heffner. “

The good and bad of broadsheet

http://reportr.net/2008/02/22/a-misguided-approach-to-electronic-paper/

The above blog post fueled ridicule of a questioner who, during a presentation for E Ink at the Future of Science Journalism Symposium, gave voice to a fundamental divide between print and electronic media that must be reconciled. Could the marketing director’s electronic-paper-display software and device, the journalist in the audience asked, do for her what a traditional broadsheet newspaper does, enable her to scan through its content? Clearly, many have missed her point in asking such a question. Surely this woman does not suggest that commuters lug with them on the subway an over-sized gadget. And unless she intends to then print out the displays so she can “feel” the pages between her fingers (my History of Journalism professor actually once said this in class), she is not some member of a new race of troglodytes, averse to computer screens and electronic text.

Until a more “human-like” graphical user interface (GUI) is developed, new-media apologists should admit that print journals still trump their digital counterparts when it comes to presentation of the news. There are rumblings of slow developments in this arena, such as “zooming” (zoomable user interface or ZUI), which is said to be closer to the human model of scanning and narrowing in on information. This could solve one of the major drawbacks to on-line news: interfacing. The first Web news source that adopts this technology will be a hero and leave its competitors leagues behind, competitors who still won’t have asked themselves, “what about broadsheet worked“. Our questioner wasn’t longing for the past, she was learning from it.

News judgment alone won’t save you

On the information superhighway of the Internet, where news updates and developing stories race by at impossible speeds, how does a stop-press junkie decide which sources to use? What makes one Web site more trustworthy and late-breaking than a rival? How do you know you are getting the news you need and not what would be more relevant in other circles which do consider noteworthy, say, the latest exploits of Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan?

My mission is to find answers to the above. I’ve given myself the assignment and created this blog to track my findings in hopes that such a report might be useful to other news aficionados.

For starters, I hope I arrive at a better and more attractive solution than http://www.newsjunkie.info. If you’re like me, you don’t want “enough news to make you sick”. You want it to satisfy your appetite…with taste.